


13 Days of Halloween - Cemeteries

by BleedingInk



Series: Halloween Challenge [4]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/F, Vampire!Alexis, alternative universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-22
Updated: 2015-10-22
Packaged: 2018-04-27 14:14:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5051566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BleedingInk/pseuds/BleedingInk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Claire's new friends dare her to take a walk through the cemetery, and she isn't exactly expecting to meet anyone there... until she bumps into Alexis. (Written for the 13 Days of Halloween Multishiping Challenge).</p>
            </blockquote>





	13 Days of Halloween - Cemeteries

The wind blowing through the branches was becoming progressively colder and stronger. Claire shivered and hugged herself. She should have picked up that jacket like Uncle Castiel had warned her to do, but like hell she was going to admit that to anyone other than herself.

The leaves rustled under her feet with every step she took. The tombstones at the cemetery’s entry had been clean, and some even had fresh flowers on them, but as Claire walked more and more into the oldest part of the cemetery, it became obvious that those tombs hadn’t been visited in a long time. Or maybe they didn’t have anyone left to visit them. That was a depressing thought.

In any case, shouldn’t the cemetery guards at least try to keep the dead foliage at bay? And shouldn’t this place be a little bit better illuminated? With a grimaced, she took out her cellphone to see where the hell she was stepping, because if she tripped and broke her leg, it was going to be awfully painful to explain what she was doing there.

It was stupid, really. She knew exactly how stupid it was, and how stupid she was for being there, but that was another thing she wasn’t going to admit out loud.

When Emma had asked her to come over to her place, Claire had actually been excited (again, not the kind of thing she would admit unless she was under severe torture). She had been the new girl at school for almost a month and a half now, and people were beginning to realize that despite her heavy make-up and the several earrings in her ears, she probably wasn’t a serial killer. They had started asking her questions about classes and awkwardly sitting with her during lunch, but Emma had been the first person that seemed legitimately interested in hanging out with her.

“You should totally come to my place this Friday,” Emma had told her. “My mom’s going to be out all night, so we’ll have the whole place to ourselves. We can like, watch a movie or something.”

“Yeah,” Claire had said, trying to come off as aloof and distant. “Sounds good, I guess. Whatever.”

The painful truth was that she had an enormous crush on the girl, but she wasn’t entirely sure how to go about it. The only person she had come out to was her uncle, and she was pretty sure that if anyone at school knew, that would be a one-way ticket back into Weirdo No One Talks To Town. Also, judging by her One Direction backpack, Emma was probably into boys, because come on, nobody liked those guys for their music, right?

In any case, the prospect of watching a movie with Emma was better than what she was planning to do on Friday, which was nothing, so she had gone. It turned it wasn’t so much a one-on-one-let’s-get-to-know-each-other-better invitation as it was a pity-you-don’t-have-friends-let-me-introduce-you-to-mine one.

“These are Krissy and Josephine.”

“Hello, hi,” the girls sitting on the couch with a bowl of popcorn greeted her.

“Hi,” Claire said, somewhere between inhibited and annoyed.

“Okay, so, I got _Paranormal Activity_ and _Paranormal Activity 2_ ,” Emma added, showing the DVD cases proudly. “This is going to be so much fun!”

Claire didn’t have the heart to tell her she had already watched basically all the _Paranormal Activity_ movies and she thought they were lame as all hell. But at least at some point they passed her the popcorn bowl and forgot to ask her to pass it back. So at least she got to enjoy the three hours of shaky camera and fake jump scares while eating something sweet.

“That was so creepy!” Emma said, when it finally ended, and she looked like she legitimately thought those cheap tricks and convoluted storylines were scary: she had her knees hugged to her chest, and she was looking nervously to the sides, like she thought something was going to attack her at any given moment.

Krissy and Josephine were just as unfazed as Claire.

“I’ve seen worse,” Krissy replied, with a shrug.

“I’ve heard worse,” Josephine said, rolling her eyes. “Do you remember that legend about the dead girl…?”

“No!” Emma said, covering her ears. “Don’t bring that up!”

But they had clearly not said it for her, but to catch Claire’s attention: they were both giving her sideway glance, waiting. So Claire decided she would be an absolute killjoy if she didn’t bite.

“What dead girl?”

“It’s just a legend,” Krissy said, with a shrug that didn’t look nearly as indifferent as she thought. “About this girl who killed herself…”

“No, no, stop,” Josephine interrupted her. “If you’re going to tell it, you need to tell with the right atmosphere.”

So she turned off the lights, they sat on the carpet, and Josephine began:

“This is the story of Annie Jones. When she was only a little girl, there was a horrible incident in her home. She showed up at her neighbor’s house, covered in blood from head to toe, her dress dripping red. The neighbor called 911, and what they found in the house…”

“Okay, hold on,” Claire interrupted her. “How long ago was this? Because the 911 system wasn’t in place until like, the sixties.”

The words had only just left her mouth when Claire realized that she had sounded like a complete nerd by telling that. Josephine actually seemed a little annoyed that she had interrupted the story at the point where she was clearly trying to build up the suspense.

“It was in the sixties,” she replied, curtly. “As I was saying, the neighbor called the police, and they made a gruesome discovery: Annie’s mother and her three brothers had been torn to pieces and scattered around the house. The only survivors were Annie’s father, who was out working, and Annie herself, who was so shocked she couldn’t tell the police who or what she had seen. Without any clues to follow, the killer was never caught.”

Claire was glad they had turned off the lights, because her “Off course they didn’t” face would have been too sarcastic for them to keep considering her a friend.

“A few years passed,” Josephine continued. “Annie became a recluse. She didn’t go to school, she didn’t have any friends. The neighbors only saw her sometimes, when she sat by her window on full moon nights. Those who saw her said she looked infinitely sad. Her father told them she had a fragile health, and that’s why she needed to remain inside the house. But the neighbors had their doubts, of course.”

“She was only a poor traumatized girl,” Emma intervened. “I mean, you would be too if you’ve seen something so horrific.”

“Oh, she was traumatized, alright,” Krissy said. “Deeply disturbed, in fact. It was rumored that since the day her family was murdered, she hadn’t spoken a word. She would go into weird catatonic like states, where she would remain immobile for days on end, staring into the void, unblinking. Other times, she would have screaming fits that lasted for hours. She would shout at the top of her lungs, punch the walls and try to rip her hair out.”

Krissy let out a high-pitched screech to illustrate exactly what she meant, and Emma startled and jumped closer to Claire. That might have been why Claire refrained from scoffing and cynically asking how they knew all of that if Annie was a recluse. Also, that story relied in very ableist tropes about the mentally ill.

“When that happened, her father would lock her up in the basement,” Krissy said. “And she would try to get out by scratching the door until her fingernails broke and bled.”

“One night, the screaming became so horrific that the neighbors once again called the police…”

“Those were some nosey neighbors,” Claire commented, and to her satisfaction, Emma giggled.

“… and they found Annie covered in blood once again,” Josephine went on saying, completely disregarding Claire. “She had murdered her father with a kitchen knife. Was she recreating the scene that had haunted her for so many years? Was there something more sinister to it? Annie never told, of course. She was declared insane and locked up in an asylum…”

“… where she committed suicide,” Krissy finished. “By stealing a nurse’s purse mirror and slashing her throat with it. They buried her on the local cemetery, where she is said to haunt those foolish enough to walk over her grave.”

Emma stood up to turn on the lights again.

“It’s a legend, of course,” she said, nervously. “Nothing but a legend.”

“More gorey than ghosty,” Claire declared, with an unimpressed shrug. “I mean, if we were making a movie about it, it would definitely be a slasher. And clearly, most of it is absolutely made-up.”

Emma nodded with relief, but Krissy and Josephine were clearly not amused by Claire’s lack of interest.

“Well, maybe we should see if it’s really a legend,” Josephine said.

“We could go to the cemetery right now and check if Annie’s grave is there,” Krissy added. “I mean, if you’re brave enough.”

“Girls, come on,” Emma tried to say. “It’s late. We could get in trouble…”

“I’ll do it,” Claire said, with a little shrug.

She knew she was being challenged. She knew if she backed down, she would be branded a coward and maybe even not invited to hang out with them anymore.

She also knew with absolute certainty that there wasn’t such thing as ghosts. She had been trying to communicate with her parent’s spirits for years. The only reason they hadn’t answered was because their spirits weren’t anywhere to be reached, Claire had decided after many frustrating attempts. And that meant, there wasn’t such thing as an afterlife.

So after some coaxing, Emma agreed to drive them all to the cemetery, but insisted she would wait in the car because she didn’t want to go anywhere near it. Krissy and Josephine escorted Claire right up to the gates and gave her instructions on how to reach Annie Jones’ supposed grave.

“Remember, you need to take a picture to prove you actually walked over it,” Krissy had warned her.

“No problem,” Claire replied. “I got this.”

And so it was that she was walking through an empty cemetery, late on an October night. She wondered if that would make a positive impression on Emma or if she would believe her too reckless to date. And maybe that was a stupid thing to be thinking about, because, as far as she knew, Emma was not into girls and…

She halted suddenly. She just walked by the stone angel she was supposed to be looking for, so she backtracked and started counting the gravestones.

“There you are, Miss Jones,” she said, when her cellphone illuminated the words. “Hope I’m not disturbing you.”

She checked the dates and made a quick calculation. Anne Jones (whether she was the Annie from the story or not) had only lived seventeen years. On top of it, it looked like nobody had bothered to polish the gravestone or leave flowers next to it in a very long time, if ever, which was tragic and sad in its own way. Claire snapped the picture and turned around to make her way back…

She crashed against the girl behind her.

Later, Claire would edit that part of her memories to convince herself she had maintained her cool, but the truth was, she screamed. Like a little bitch. And she dropped her cellphone too.

Which was fine, because the other girl screamed too.

They stared down at each other for a moment. The other girl had straight black hair and was wearing a white shirt and a jean jacket. She was looking at Claire with a mouth slightly opened and eyes practically jumping out of the sockets.

“What the hell?” the girl asked. “Why are you taking pictures of gravestones?”

“Why are you silently walking on cemeteries late at night?” Claire asked, resenting the implication that somehow she was the weird one for doing that.

The other girl opened her mouth, but clearly didn’t know what to say, so she closed it again.

Claire started discarding the things she knew about her, just to know if she should run or not. She wasn’t a ghost (the fact she had bumped into her was a testament of that), she didn’t seem to have any witchcraft paraphernalia with her, so she wasn’t a Satan worshipper, and she wasn’t wearing black clothes. She wasn’t jumping on her trying to mug her, and she hadn’t taken out any weapons that she could see.

“… well, I asked first,” said the girl, lamely while Claire did all those deductions.

“Peer pressure,” Claire explained with a shrug. “Now you.”

The girl seemed bewildered that Claire would actually ask. She crossed her arms over her chest and shifted her weight from own feet to the other.

“I just… thought it was lovely night for a walk,” she replied, looking at her shoes. “And I like coming here. It’s… quiet.”

Okay, so she was just a weird girl who liked taking strolls across cemeteries. Claire, who owned at least three Ouija boards, was hardly in any position to judge her.

“But why were you taking a picture of…? Oh, Annie Jones,” the girl said, with a tone that clearly meant ‘Of course!’ “Yeah, that story.”

“Yeah, her ghost is supposed to appear and haunt me now,” Claire laughed.

“Somehow I doubt it.”

“Me too.”

They looked at each other, and smiled at the same time. Claire was impressed by how white and straight her teeth were.

“I’m Claire, by the way,” she introduced herself.

“Oh, uh… Alexis,” the girl said. Claire thought she hesitated before saying that, but she attributed it to the general weirdness of the situation.

“Do you live around here?” Claire asked. It seemed obvious, since she was stalking the cemetery, but Claire still compelled to ask. “I haven’t seen you at school or… anywhere else.”

“I’m homeschooled,” Alexis said, simply.

“Okay,” Claire nodded. Yep, Alexis come off as just slightly awkward, but she seemed pretty nice, actually.

Oh, God, she really needed to stop getting these random crushes on girls she barely knew.

“So… I guess I’m going to…”

“Oh, let me walk with you,” Alexis offered. “You never know what kind of weirdos are around these parts.”

“You’re telling me?” Claire asked, mockingly, and Alexis merely laughed.

“So you’re new in town?”

“Yeah, I live with my uncle. We move around a lot.”

Alexis didn’t ask why Claire lived with her uncle or why they moved, which Claire appreciated. She didn’t like sharing those details about her personal life.

“And how’s being homeschooled?”

“It’s fine, I guess,” Alexis shrugged. “Sometimes I wish I could go to school like everybody, you know?”

“Why?” Claire grimaced. “School is horrible.”

“Maybe,” Alexis laughed again. “But that would mean I don’t have this… weird skin condition that keeps from going out into the sun.”

“Ah, that explains the supernatural paleness,” Claire said, and it took him a few seconds to realize she had said it out loud. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine…” Alexis began smiling, but it froze in her face.

She grabbed Claire’s arm with enough strength to break it and dragged her towards the nearest tree.

“What the…?”

Alexis shushed her.

“I wasn’t joking about the weirdos,” she explained quickly.

Claire opened her mouth to protest or to ask, she wasn’t sure which when she heard it: steps coming towards them. There were several people, apparently, and they clearly weren’t worried about being sneaky.

“She’s going to freak out…” someone snickered, and Claire recognized her voice: Emma. She didn’t seem all that scared now.

“Emma, I don’t know,” Krissy replied. “Didn’t you read that news stories about that guy who was pranked by his friends and had a heart attack? Maybe we shouldn’t…”

“Oh, come on, I’ve been putting on a charade all night,” Emma huffed. “‘ _Oh, I’m so scared, Claire, oh, Claire, let me sit right next to you…’_ She’ll never suspect.”

“Why you gotta be so mean to her?” Josephine groaned, obviously not happy about her friend’s mockery.

“Because she’s such a freak,” Emma replied, simply. “And did you notice how she’s always looking at me? It’s like she’s obsessed.”

“Maybe she likes you, Em,” Krissy suggested.

“Exactly,” Emma replied. “That’s why we gotta show her what a joke she is.”

The steps and the voices faded in the distance. Claire’s heart was pounding in her chest, and her hands trembled when she put them against the tree. Alexis was looking at her with something that looked a lot like pity.

“Were those your friends?” she asked. “I’m… sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Claire said, although her voice didn’t sound as firm as she would have liked. Probably because there was a burning lump in her throat. “I’m used to being the freak.”

Alexis clenched her jaw, like what Claire had just said somehow angered her.

“They shouldn’t treat you like that.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Claire said, squaring her shoulders. “They’re losers. I’m not even going to think about them.”

Of course she was thinking about them all the way to the cemetery gates, but she tried to smile and show interest in what Alexis was telling her about her three brothers and such. It was actually hard to pull off, but she thought she managed, because when it was time to go their separate ways, Alexis asked:

“Can I… come and visit you?”

“Visit me?” Claire repeated, confused. “Like, to my house?”

“Well, yeah,” Alexis said, with a little giggle. “It’s not like we’re going to see each other at school.”

There were two options: she was trying to cheer Claire up by pretending she wasn’t completely undesirable to be around (unlikely, people were rarely that good) or she didn’t have many friends at all (probable). In any case, Claire appreciated it.

“Sure,” she said. “Oh, but you don’t know where my house is.”

“Don’t worry,” Alexis replied, with a little smirk. “I’ll find out.”

“Okay, weird,” Claire pointed out.

“I like weird,” Alexis replied. “You?”

Claire thought about it, and then nodded with a little smile. At least the night hadn’t been a complete waste.

 

* * *

 

“She probably already left or is waiting for us at the car,” Krissy protested for the third time. “Let’s go back.”

They had been waiting around the gravestone for about half an hour now, and it was obvious that Claire wasn’t around. But Emma wouldn’t be so easily defeated. She had gone through the pain of ruining a perfectly good white blouse with cranberry juice for this prank.

“Well, maybe we should split and search for her,” she suggested. “Whoever finds her lets everyone know and…”

“Hell no,” Josephine interrupted her. “Splitting is a surefire way to get yourself killed.”

“This isn’t a horror movie,” Emma reminded her, irritated.

“No, because if it was a horror movie, we’d be the bullies of the main character and we would have already been killed,” Krissy pointed out.

Emma huffed, annoyed. Why they had to be like that, so… conscientious and nice? Claire was just an idiot; it would be fun to scare her. End of the story. Who cared if she…?

Her thoughts were cut short by a noise coming from behind her. She turned around, half-expecting to see Claire coming at the grave. But instead, she only saw the dry leaves rustling in the wind.

“Did you guys hear that?” she asked.

“Oh, come on, I thought we were trying to scare _Claire_ ,” Josephine reminded her.

“I’m not kidding,” Emma replied. “I thought I heard something…”

“Yeah, whatever,” Krissy rolled her eyes. “Obviously, Claire beat it and we should do the same. Let’s get out of here, Jo.”

Josephine didn’t have to be told twice. She stood up and followed Krissy down the path.

“Wait!” Emma tried to call them, but before she could make a move, a cold hand came to rest on her shoulder. The scream that she was about to let out was suffocated by a second hand covering her mouth.

“Good girls shouldn't be out so late,” a soft, playful voice whispered in her ear. “Who knows what could happen to them?”

A sharp pain in her neck paralyzed her completely. She had to stand there, listening to the obscene sounds of someone swallowing with gluttony, her mind blank with panic.

When the hands let her go, Emma didn’t look back. She didn’t try to scream or fight, she just ran like hell, as fast as her long legs could carry her. Later she would try to rationalize it all, to tell herself that she had been influenced by the atmosphere, by the night, by the movies they had watched earlier. She would tell herself that the small marks in her neck were mosquito bites, and that she had imagined the whole thing.

But deep down, she would know. She would know she didn’t imagine that voice that haunted her nightmares for months to come. She would know every time she looked over her shoulders with apprehension. She would know every time she thought she saw something move out of the corner of her eye.

Alexis laughed to herself and licked the droplets of blood around her lips.

In two steps, she was back next to the grave. Her grave, from many, many years before. The stories that ran about her were wild, but none of them were anywhere near the truth.

She wondered if she would ever share that story with Claire. Maybe later, when she had got to know her, when she was sure she wouldn’t judge Alexis for being what she was.

For now, she told herself as she picked Claire’s abandoned cellphone, it was nice to have a new friend.


End file.
